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Saturday, 18 October 2014

The Family - "What will survive of us is love" (Philip Larkin)

Two days of encounters, conversations
and reflections have left me perplexed, inspired, challenged,
and with a keen sense of ‘being there’.

When Vatican II was happening, I was a Presbyterian schoolgirl
living in Lusaka, Zambia, attending the Dominican Convent School. I think I
registered that something significant was happening when the nuns shed their
wimples, one of them auditioned for The Sound of the
Music at Lusaka Playhouse, two of them came to my Presbyterian confirmation service, and one left to get
married. Dear Sister Ceslaus, the mighty maths
teacher who was later murdered in an attack on a mission in Zimbabwe (then
Rhodesia) during UDI, told her Protestant charges: ‘Now girls, don’t go home
and tell your parents I told you this, but just remember the words of Martin
Luther on his deathbed: “It is easier to live as a Protestant, but it is easier
to die as a Catholic.”’ I don’t think Luther actually said that, but obviously
her strategy worked.

Since coming to live in Britain in the late 1980s as a new
convert to Catholicism, I have become a little bored by the nostalgia for the
Council which constitutes a pervasive melancholic aura among liberal Catholics
of a certain age. Today, there’s a new generation of Catholics who were
born into the postconciliar Church, and many of them simply don’t care about
the politics of the Vatican. They practise birth control, cohabit, ‘come out’,
do whatever they need to do to survive as Catholics who are both faithful and
intelligent. At the other end of the spectrum is a narrow group of ideologues
(some of them also young), who believe themselves to be the custodians and
progenitors of the One True Church over and against liberals, relativists,
feminists, homosexuals, and all the rest of the wicked forces of modernity that
are destroying God’s Church. Ho hum.

This week, however, I am so glad to be in Rome, because I
suspect that, for the first time since 1968, the spirit of Vatican II is dancing
in the streets of this city. The politics, the gossip and the intrigue are
compelling.

The English translation of Monday's interim document has been reworded. The section on gays and lesbians has been retitled from ‘Welcoming
homosexual persons’ to ‘Providing for homosexual persons’, and a few other
changes have been made to the wording. Cardinal Raymond Burke has apparently confirmed stories that he is on his way out.
Similar unconfirmed rumours are circulating about Cardinal Gerhard
Müller, President of the CDF. Cardinal Marx has said that doctrine can develop and change. Cardinal Walter Kasper was accused
of being a racist on the basis of a report by journalist Edward Pentin, whose impromptu interview with Cardinal Kasper outside the Synod Hall resulted in some comments on Africa by the Cardinal which were construed as racist in some reports, with an ensuing controversy as to who said what and how it was reported. [Please note I have changed the wording of this last sentence, since in two commenst posted below Benedict Ambrose pointed out I had his name wrong, and challenged my interpretation of Pentin's piece. See the first comment for a link to Pentin's clarification].

The point Kaspar was making
is in my view one of the two central issues of this Synod: how to reconcile the
vast cultural differences within the Church, in a Synod that brings together
bishops from across the world’s cultures and contexts. It is a reminder that
the unity of the Catholic Church is a liturgical and sacramental unity, not a
moral and cultural unity. Bishops and cardinals from some African and Muslim
countries have apparently been shocked by the open discussion of ‘taboo’ issues
such as homosexuality, and there are diverse responses to the question of the
readmission of divorced and remarried Catholics to the sacraments, as I
mentioned on a previous blog. Polygamy, forced marriages and similar issues
have been on the agenda, but they have not attracted the same media attention as
homosexuality.

I fact, I suspect that the media are to blame for giving the impression that this has been a Synod primarily concerned with homosexuality, in a way which suggests (wrongly I think) that fundamental
threats to the well-being of families and individuals are being squeezed off
the agenda. I heard from somebody that the highly popular Cardinal Taglia of
the Philippines said it breaks his heart every time he goes to the airport in
Manila, because so many people are leaving the country in search of work. Why
is nobody covering the Synod writing about these things? What does it do to a family when a mother emigrates to act as cheap labour caring for other people’s children in
London, New York or Rome? Indeed, I am suddenly struck by the extent to which,
wherever you go in the world, dark-skinned people wait in attendance on
light-skinned people. I find myself looking around with new eyes since hearing
Taglia’s comment, and wondering about all these displaced human beings eking out a living
on the margins of our modern world – the African men selling handbags on every Roman
street, the shabby tour guides and street performers at every attraction, the desperate eyes of those
who thrust cheap plastic trinkets and baubles in the faces of tourists, begging
them to buy something. And these are the lucky ones. What about the bundles of
rags in doorways and piles of clothing huddled on benches, which turn out to be human beings
with nowhere else to go?

In a café I sat near a bishop from the Congo. I
wondered what stories he might tell about ‘families’, from that context of rape
and war and poverty and despair. I remember a few years ago meeting a devout Catholic woman from
the Congo, who had spent three years living in the forest with her five
children, foraging for food, to escape the raping armies of whatever men were
fighting for power at the time. What about her family? What about those from
West Africa, where families are being shredded by the Ebola epidemic? And what
of the bishops and cardinals from Muslim countries, where Christian and Muslim mothers alike are
raped and children are murdered? I hear that some of those church leaders from
such societies say that they forbid marriage between Christians and Muslims.
Catholics who marry Muslims excommunicate themselves, they say. That is heresy,
and surely the seeds of violence are fed the poison they need to flourish in
the face of such bigotry. Others have pointed out that in a world of so many mixed marriages, so much cohabitation, so many forms of marriage and family life, the number of marriages that would be truly sacramentally valid in the eyes of the Church might be infinitesimally small.

Yet one would think, reading
about this Synod, that the greatest challenge, opportunity or threat to the
modern family (depending on how you see these things) is homosexuality. Having initially been irritated by what I thought was a distorted emphasis in this respect, I have in the last couple of days come to realize that this is indeed a core doctrinal issue, because more than poverty and violence, more than divorce and remarriage, it is a question that goes to the very heart of the Church's sexual anthropology. Is sexuality an intrinsically personal dimension of our need for and capacity to express love in a bodily way that engages our whole being in a relationship of intimacy, trust and vulnerability? Or is sexuality more about genital difference and procreation? Put it like that, and the answer should be obvious. However, Pope John Paul II's 'theology of the body', promoted around the world primarily by way of well-funded American campaigns, holds that sexual difference goes to the very core of our being, and to fail to recognise that is to distort our understanding of what it means to be human. Having spent years researching and writing about 'theology of the body', I think it functions more as a vehicle of resistance to feminism and homosexuality than as a genuinely viable account of human sexuality - notwithstanding the fact that couples who can afford large families, who are psychologically, sexually and spiritually on the same wave length, and/or who are obedient and dutiful servants of the Church, promote it as if encountering the sexual other were second only to the beatific vision. Fine when you're falling in love at the age of twenty, but a bit hard to sustain through forty years and more of married life.

Yet at the other end of the spectrum, there is also something ethically and existentially repellent about those advocates of gendered performativity who would reduce sexual difference to cultural conditioning and nothing more. Our bodies matter, and sex is a very large part of that mattering. We do not yet begin to comprehend that complex interface between culture and nature, where our sexed humanity is both given and constructed, fundamental to who we are in some ways, incidental to who we are in many other ways. However, one thing we can be sure of. Sexual difference functions as a powerful mechanism of exclusion when it comes to women, and nowhere more so than in this most clerical of cities.

This is the second big issue. No - this is THE BIG
ISSUE. Where are the women in this Synod? It is beyond belief that, in a Synod
on the family, the voices of women have been almost entirely excluded, except insofar as they speak as half of a couple. As one woman journalist
observed to me, ‘Women are speaking only as couples. But couples
don’t speak. Only men and women can speak.' Where are the
mothers and daughters, the sisters and aunts, the members of religious orders
who mother the poor and care for those who have nobody else to care for them? Where are those who would cry to the heavens about the fact that 800 of the world's poorest women die every day through causes relating to childbirth, yet they never merit a mention in this church of the poor? In his latest 'Letter from Rome', Robert Mickens points out that 'In a meeting room filled with more than two hundred people, mostly
clerics (bishops, priests and seminarian-aides), only twenty-five are
women. It’s not exactly an edifying image of inclusiveness.' As the
absence of women begins to gnaw away at me, I find myself in a state of jaw-dropping incredulity. How is it possible for a Synod of more than two hundred
people to spend nearly two weeks discussing the family, without a single
representative of women being allowed to speak as a woman, on behalf of herself and not on behalf of 'the couple' or 'the family'?

Today, we eagerly await publication of the final document from this Synod, though rumours are that it might not be released until Monday or Tuesday. That is when the important business will really begin, and it is in the interests of every woman, child and man in the Church that we women insist upon having a voice and being heard in the process of deliberation that will occupy the life of the Church between now and the next Synod in October 2015, when the discussions and dialogues opened up this
week are finalised and translated into doctrine and practice. That is not long,
particularly when one is dealing with two thousand years of history. But do not
believe anybody who tells you that those two thousand years have been an
unchanging history of ‘the family’ - the semper idemists, as one person called them this week. There is no such thing as The Family. There
are only human beings, vulnerable and muddled, woven together of starlight and
dust, of memories and dreams, of flesh and fantasy, all of us hungry for only
one thing that can truly sustain us and feed us and express what it means to be
human – love.

Somebody only half-jokingly said to me that the
Church in Rome is ‘the vortex of dysfunctionality’. I found myself smiling
about that phrase through the rest of the day, and I began to think that surely,
that could be a good way of describing ‘the family’? This is where each and
every one of us learns to love and be loved – for better for worse, for richer
or poorer. This is where all our dysfunctionalities are forced out into the
open and we go through the painful, unending process of learning who we are and hopefully how to become better at that task of being. To stay committed to love, come what
may, in such a context, is perhaps the most challenging task any of us faces,
and the fragility of our successes always stands under threat by the woundings
of our failures. That's what families are about, but what matters is not
‘the family’ but the love that makes and breaks each person within that communal group that is sometimes about love and cherishing, but that is sometimes
also about hatred and violence.

Ours is the task of recovering the truth, beauty, and
goodness of marriage and family. In a world that wonders if anyone can really
say “forever;” if fidelity is possible; if children are a gift and never a
burden; we say, yes! We echo what God the Father, His Son, and His Spirit alive
in the Church have revealed: that the bond between a man and woman in marriage,
faithful and forever, leads to a healthy, sound civilization, with happiness
here and in eternity.

We dare to be poets and romantics, reclaiming
the foundation of the “civilization of love” and “culture of life” that can
transform the world, resisting the temptation to conform to a world that
wonders if any love—God’s love, or the love of a man and woman in marriage—can
ever be forever. In a world that often answers “no,” we thunder a yes!

That’s my sentiment as I prepare to return home to you, my people, with a
renewed admiration for our wonderful married couples and families! I love
you! I thank you! I need you!

Walking home late on Thursday night from St. Peter’s to Trastevere
along the river, I noticed flowers and a child’s mementoes attached to the
railings of Ponte Mazzini. I stopped to read the notices which explained what
had happened. I read the short, unbearable story of Claudio Franceschelli, ‘the
angel of Ponte Mazzini’.

Sixteen months old, Claudio, the son of Claudia and
Patrizio, was staying with his grandmother in Trastevere. It was early morning –
a freezing, snowy February morning. Claudio
was snuggled in bed asleep between his nona, Rita, and his pregnant aunt, Manuela, when
his demented father arrived at the apartment. The father took the child out
into the icy streets and carried him to the bridge, fighting off everybody who
tried to stop him, breaking the desperate grandmother's finger in the process. He threw the dazed child into the river. The English
translation of the note on the railings explains that ‘We want to believe that
Claudio never touched the chilled water of Trevere, but flied directly in the
sky, becoming Ponte Mazzini’s Angel’.

Maybe cardinals who want to write poetically about the family
should go and do so on Ponte Mazzini, and pray for inspiration from The Angel
of Ponte Mazzini.

Children have a right to be loved. Humans have a right to be
loved. From that right flows every other right, and if that right is denied, no
other right will ever make us truly human.

People seem to be having problems posting comments - I'm not sure why. Here's another one sent to me by GS, with a request to publish it:

Not dreary, melancholy, and rightly so.

How drearily predictable is the continuing scandalous saga of female theologians In Rome, on the spot, close to 200+ male clerics debating the family and sexuality, yet, as a woman, barred from speaking from the perspective of half the human population.How often is a woman asked why she stays a Christian, let alone a Catholic!

While the Catholic Church hierarchy refuses to uncover, reveal, and develop an inclusive theology of humankind, which is true Christianity, it will continue to be described as irredeemably misogynistic, and theologians like you Dr Beattie, will continue to be unjustly marginalised, musing outside the walls of the Vatican.

In 2010 Mary C Gordon wrote:

"How do some of us stay in the Church? In grief, in sadness, with a resolve not to be shut out by those who say they are speaking in the name of the Father. We just don't believe them. The Church is not an institution; it is the people, people who are now wounded and scandalized, not only by the sexual crimes of priests, but more important, by the cover-up by those in power. In 1959 the election of Pope John XXIII was a surprise, a kind of miracle. It happened once. It could happen again. We wait, in stubborn hope, for the return of miracle. We want to make sure some of us are at home when it happens."

Dr Beattie, every single thing you have said in this piece about Pentin and his interview with Cdl Kasper is wrong - including Pentin's Christian name and nationality. His statement about the interview is here: http://edwardpentin.co.uk/statement-on-cardinal-kasper-interview/ He has never accused Kasper of racism - he merely reported his actual words. Even Kasper himself, who initially denied even saying those things, is not longer disputing this.

I'm sure you will agree that it is your duty, in charity and in truth, to correct these errors as a matter of urgency.

I would, however, ask you to consider whether your remaining comment that Pentin "twisted [Kasper's] few words of broken English to make an irresponsible story" is itself responsible or in any way fair. Pentin, the Rome correspondent for the Catholic Herald, is a highly-regarded Catholic journalist whose whose professional reputation (if not livelihood) is at stake here.

Ernie Todd had trouble getting on line to post a comment, so I am posting it here on his behalf.

Dear Professor Tina,

First of all, my sincere congratulations to you and your husband on becoming Grandparents ! Being a grandparent is a wonderful part of our lives, we enjoy our grandchildren so much, but we can always return them to their parent/s when we’ve had enough ! You will be pleased to hear I agree with your every word about grandchildren, may Almighty God bless them all.

To “business” - well, I think you are a “little behind the aeroplane” about Mr Pantin, as in fact he recorded his interview with Cardinal Kasper quite openly and has now published it, justifying his report. It seems to me, this revelation means a completely different take on the issue, one which is most unfavourable to the aforesaid cardinal. Either he had a sudden memory failure or he was being economical with the truth. At any rate, the good African bishops were not fooled, in particular Cardinal Napier, from Durban. Normally a fairly reserved prelate, he been outspoken in drawing attention to the manipulation of various texts and secretive behaviour during the Synod, which, unfortunately, would point to one particular man as the inspiration. References can be supplied, if necessary and it’s surprising that you don’t seem to be up to speed with this development. Normally, Rome is abuzz with anything to do with events such as Consistories, Conclaves or Synods.

It was a surprise to see you consider the small number of women participating in the Synod to be the Big Issue of the gathering, I would have thought that the overt attack on age-old Catholic doctrine was far more important than feminism ? It’s about Faith and Morals. I believe I am safe in saying female representation cannot be found in any doctrinal references. Maybe you would like to see a quota system introduced, rather like the selection of a South African rugby team ?

By the way, I think you might find your nice picture is of Ponte Sisto, not Ponte Mazzini. The clue is in the central opening, designed to alleviate flooding on the Tiber.

Dr Beattie, you are a source of hope and inspiration in this difficult but defining time for the Church. Your ability to speak out in spirit and truth is truly courageous. But, as you obviously realise, resistance is inevitable:

"There is a moment in which the self-affirmation of the average man becomes neurotic: when changes of the reality to which he is adjusted threaten the fragmentary courage with which he has mastered the accustomed objects of fear. If this happens - and it often happens in critical periods of history - the self-affirmation becomes pathological. The dangers connected with the change, the unknown character of the things to come, the darkness of the future, make the average man a fanatical defender of the established order. He defends it as compulsively as the neurotic defends the castle of his imaginary world. He loses his comparative openness to reality, he experiences an unknown depth of anxiety." (Paul Tillich)